> Thanks for the quick reply. I ran my tests with a hostfile with
> cedar.reachone.com slots=4
>
> I clearly misunderstood the role of the 'slots' parameter, because
> when I removed it, OPENMPI slightly outperformed LAM, which I
> assume it should. Thanks for the help.

Not entirely your fault -- I just went back and re-read the FAQ
entries and can easily see how the wording would lead you to that
conclusion. I have touched up the wording to make it more clear, and
added an FAQ item about oversubscription:

------
Can I oversubscribe nodes (run more processes than processors)?

Yes.

However, it is critical that Open MPI knows that you are
oversubscribing the node, or severe performance degredation can result.

The short explanation is as follows: never specify a number of slots
that is more than the available number of processors. For example, if
you want to run 4 processes on a uniprocessor, then indicate that you
only have 1 slot but want to run 4 processes. For example:

Specifically: do NOT have a hostfile that contains "slots =
4" (because there is only one available processor).

Here's the full explanation:

Open MPI basically runs its message passing progression engine in two
modes: aggressive and degraded.

Degraded: When Open MPI thinks that it is in an oversubscribed mode
(i.e., more processes are running than there are processors
available), MPI processes will automatically run in degraded mode and
frequently yield the processor to its peers, thereby allowing all
processes to make progress.

Aggressive: When Open MPI thinks that it is in an exactly- or under-
subscribed mode (i.e., the number of running processes is equal to or
less than the numebr of available processors), MPI processes will
automatically run in aggressive mode, meaning that they will never
voluntarily give up the processor to other processes. With some
network transports, this means that Open MPI will spin in tight loops
attempting to make message passing progress, effectively causing
other processes to not get any CPU cycles (and therefore never make
any progress).
For example, on a uniprocessor node:

This would cause all 4 MPI processes to run in aggressive mode
because Open MPI thinks that there are 4 available processors to use.
This is actually a lie (there is only 1 processor -- not 4), and can
cause extremely bad performance.